Big & Small Stories
International Symposium, June 18-19, 2025.
Tampere University, Linna -building, room K103 (Kalevantie 5, 33100 Tampere, Finland) or Zoom (Link Meeting ID: 641 6856 2117 Passcode: 458666)
Keynotes: Jan Alber, Alex Georgakopoulou, Elise Kraatila, Jarmila Mildorf
Narrative studies have often focused on lengthy accounts of happenings, be it fictional literature (novels) that the classical narratology is based on, or biographical interviews social sciences often analyze. Small stories paradigm was established to broaden the definition of narrative outside of long, teller-led accounts of past events and to shift the focus more on how stories function in interaction from the content of stories told. Small stories research focuses on ways and sites of telling as well as the tellers in the effort to analyze stories in context and their relation to identities. Its aim is to offer tools and modes of analysis for socio-cultural and situational context of stories, the interplay between dominant and counter-narratives as well as the interchange between personal and collective, culturally established stories. (See Georgakopoulou, Giaxoglou & Patron 2023, “Introduction”.)
On the other hand, those stories that narrative studies have traditionally focused on are led to a conventional understanding of “prototypical narrative” as a form geared towards conveying human or human-like experientiality (e. g. Herman 2009). This focus on human-scale accounts and individual subjectivity limits the field’s capacity to grapple with the grander-scale and collective forms of storytelling that various actors engage in to make narrative sense of happenings related to complex systems and wicked problems like climate change, geopolitical crises, and pandemics. Are these kinds of phenomena truly as “unnarratable” as some theorists suggest (Walsh 2018; Raipola 2019), or do they, like the small stories, merely constitute a challenge to classical narrative theory?
The symposium is organized in the context of the project Age of Uncertainty: Speculative Narratives in 21st-century Fiction and Nonfiction (PI Elise Kraatila, Tampere Institute for Advanced Study) in collaboration with Narrare.
Symposium Programme:
Wednesday June 18 (all times are in EET)
10.15 – 12.00 Keynote session I (Chair: Mari Hatavara)
Elise Kraatila: Big Stories and Grand-scale Systems Thinking in Fiction and Nonfiction (abstract)
Jan Alber: The Political Ramifications of Big Stories (abstract)
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch break
13.30 – 15.15 Keynote Session II (Chair: Mari Hatavara)
Alexandra Georgakopoulou: Reimagining small stories as formatted narratives in the postdigital era (abstract)
Jarmila Mildorf: Telling Difficult Stories: Small Stories and the Limits of Sense-Making (abstract)
15.15 – 15.45 Break
15.45 – 16.45 Panel discussion: Core questions of big and small stories (Chair: Laura Piippo)
Thursday June 19
10.15 – 11.15 Paper session I (Chair: Laura Piippo)
Mari Hatavara: Narrativity in the Parliamentary Talk. How to Interpretate Small (or Big) Stories in Argumentative Language Use?
Markus Laukkanen & Riikka Pirinen: Small Stories about Big Geopolitics in Finnish journalism about NATO
11.15 – 11.30 Break
11.30 – 12.30 Paper session II (Chair: Laura Piippo)
Aura Lounasmaa: Representation, truth and tellability in small stories of forced migration
Anna Kuutsa: Verbalizing Master and Counter Narratives in Fictional Dialogue
Keynotes:
Jan Alber is Professor and Chair of New English and American Literature at JLU Giessen University (Germany) and Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). He is the author of Narrating the Prison (Cambria Press, 2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Alber’s articles have been published in journals such as European Journal of English Studies, Journal of Narrative Theory, Literature Compass, Narrative, Poetics Today, Scientific Study of Literature, Storyworlds, and Style. He is the editor (or co-editor) of 13 edited collections, the most recent one being Pandemic Storytelling (with Deborah de Muijnck and Jessica Jumpertz) (Brill, 2025). The Routledge Companion to Literature and Cognitive Studies (ed. Jan Alber and Ralf Schneider) will be published later this year. Alber is currently working on a UKRI project (funded by AHRC and the German Research Foundation) on post-postmodernist fictions of the digital (PPFDs) with Alice Bell
Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, King’s College London. She has developed small stories research, a paradigm for the analysis of everyday life storytelling and identities, with a current focus on storytelling as curated communication on social media. She has (co)-authored & edited 18 books of which the latest volume is: Influencer discourse: Affective relations & identities (2024; co-ed. with Pilar Blitvich, John Benjamins). She is currently completing a monograph with Anna De Fina entitled Analyzing narrative online (forthcoming, Routledge). She is the Co-Editor of the Routledge Research in Narrative, Interaction & Discourse Series.
Elise Kraatila is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere Institute for Advanced Study. Her current research project, ‘Age of Uncertainty: Speculative Narratives in Fiction and Nonfiction’ (2023–2025) concerns future-oriented speculation and scenario-building; the previous, one, ‘Global-scale Poetics’ (2022–2023) investigated representations of planetary-scale phenomena in contemporary science fiction; and the next one, ‘Journalistic Future Narratives in and about Nato-era Finland’ (2025–2027) will tackle the role of storytelling in media discourse surrounding Finnish foreign policy since Spring 2022. Kraatila’s research interests and publications have long revolved around speculation as an epistemic and rhetorical property of storytelling and the limits of narrative representation. Her first monograph on these (and other) topics, Speculative Mimesis in Fantasy Literature, will be out from Bloomsbury Academic next Autumn.
Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English Philology at the University of Paderborn. Her research focuses on life storytelling in oral history and autobiography, second-person narration, dialogue, audionarratology, radio drama, literature and medicine and the medical humanities. She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (De Gruyter, 2023), and co-editor of numerous collections and journal special issues, most recently, Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2023), Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill, 2024), Performing Selves in the 21st Century (forthcoming in Partial Answers) and Life Storytelling across Media and Contexts (forthcoming in Narrative Inquiry). Mildorf serves on the editorial boards of the book series Narratives and Mental Health, Jahrbuch Literatur und Medizin and the journals EON and Re:visit.